Senegalese President Resorts to Bribing Trump in Trade Meeting

Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye used a tried and true method to curry favor with President Donald Trump: shameless flattery.

“I know you are a tremendous golf player. Golf requires concentration and precision—qualities that also make for a great leader,” Faye said during Trump’s meeting of African leaders on Wednesday. “Senegal has exceptional opportunities to offer, including in the area of tourism. So, perhaps an investment could be made in a golf course in Senegal. It would just be six hours by flight from New York, from Miami, from Europe, or from the Gulf, and that would be an opportunity for you to show off your skills on the golf course too.”

Trump seemed tickled.

“Nice, that’s some way to show off my skills. It’s a long trip to show off my skill. But that’s really nice. And he’s led a very interesting life,” Trump said, responding to Faye. “He looks like a very young person; he’s a little older than he looks. But a fantastic job. He was treated very unfairly by his government, and he prevailed, so congratulations on that.”

Faye, who went from political prisoner in 2023 to the first opposition candidate to win the presidency since 1960, made comments reminiscent of the “luxury jet” that the Qatari government so graciously gifted to Trump (although in that case, Trump asked for the jet first). It’s alarming that the sitting president is susceptible to even the most basic levels of flattery—and that foreign leaders everywhere can tell.

At least one person in the Trump administration stands to make a fortune at the National Weather Service’s deathbed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its subsidiary, the National Weather Service. But until recently, he also ran a financial firm, Cantor Fitzgerald (which he placed under the stewardship of his two twentysomething sons), that invests in companies vying to replace the weather agencies’ labor.

Cantor owns a controlling interest in BGC Group, which created a weather derivatives desk in 2023 to analyze its clients’ climate-related financial exposure. Cantor is also invested in a satellite company that photographs natural disasters and weather events in real time. Lutnick is especially close to that project—he helped the company go public in 2022.

Lutnick’s most recent ethics filing revealed that he is still in the process of selling off his shares in the company. Securities and Exchange Commission filings obtained by the Associated Press indicate that Lutnick’s stakes aren’t going far—instead, he’s been transferring them to one of his sons.

Lutnick isn’t the only one with outside interests in nixing the agency. Donald Trump’s pick to run NOAA, Neil Jacobs, has been an enthusiastic advocate for privatizing the department’s work. He was previously employed by Panasonic Weather Solutions, one such company collecting weather data. And Trump’s nominee for another NOAA post, Taylor Jordan, is a K-Street lobbyist “with a roster of weather-related clients,” according to the Associated Press.

Trump has been attacking the country’s public weather-monitoring systems since he was on the campaign trail, promising to dismantle NOAA since Hurricane Helene devastated the South.

In February, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk sized down NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, which is responsible for imposing regulations on two of Musk’s largest assets: SpaceX and Starlink. Musk laid off a third of the office’s staff.

Two months later, the administration proposed formal plans to eviscerate the rest of NOAA’s budget. In internal documents obtained by CNN, the White House claimed that the agency’s myriad weather-related programs were “misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.”

Nixing NOAA was the brainchild of Project 2025. On page 664, the Christian nationalist manifesto argued that the agency “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

But losing NOAA and its federally funded research would have immediate ramifications for the average American. It would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions to replace what currently feels commonplace, for instance national weather alert systems for emergencies such as flash flooding, tornadoes, extreme heat, and earthquakes.

The White House’s machinations against the weather agency have come under increased scrutiny since Texas faltered in notifying Kerr County residents of an oncoming flash flood over the weekend. It’s unclear if federal cuts played a role in how local and state authorities responded to the event, but the communication failure produced one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing at least 119 people across central Texas, with 173 people still missing.

“The Weather Service did a good job with the information you had here. I don’t think the staffing cuts contributed to this,” Andy Hazelton, one of the recently laid-off NOAA climate scientists, told the BBC. “But this is the kind of event we can see more of if the cuts to NOAA continue, if you make the models worse or have the staffing levels lower.”

Permanently ending access to public weather notifications could be the beginning of many more disasters down the line, as Americans would be cornered into paying for another subscription or unknowingly putting themselves at risk.

“It’s the most insidious aspect of this: Are we really talking about making weather products available only to those who can afford it?” Rick Spinrad, a former NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told the Associated Press. “Basically turning the weather service into a subscription streaming service? As a taxpayer, I don’t want to be in the position of saying, ‘I get a better weather forecast because I’m willing to pay for it.’”

In an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday, Trump’s agriculture chief, Brooke Rollins, revealed that the administration has no plan to fix the damage his mass deportations are inflicting on the U.S. food supply.

The Trump administration has thus far sent confused signals on how it plans to conduct its promised mass deportations without crippling the economy and food system, which depend in large part on the labor of undocumented workers whose jobs U.S. citizens are not rushing to take. The president recently pledged to let undocumented farmworkers remain in the U.S. if their employers vouch for them.

Anchor David Asman asked Rollins for clarification on whether some undocumented farmworkers will be allowed to stay.

“Ultimately, we have to move toward a 100 percent legal workforce, and that’s what this president stands for, and that’s what we’re doing,” the agriculture secretary replied. “The mass deportations will continue, but the president has been very clear that we have to make sure we’re not compromising our food supply at the same time.”

Providing nothing by way of how the administration will reconcile those two conflicting promises, Rollins’s answer led Asman to press: “It sounds like you don’t yet have a concrete proposal to deal with farmers who rely on undocumented workers, am I right?”

“Well, no. We’re working on it,” Rollins began, before Asman cut back in, saying, “You’re working on it, but that’s not a concrete proposal.”

“Well, no. The president has been very, very clear,” Rollins continued. “We need to make sure that the food supply is safe. [Labor Secretary] Lori Chavez-DeRemer is on it, she’s leading the way. The H-2A [temporary agriculture worker] program has been in place for a long time. The border has to be secure. And there will be no amnesty. Listen, none of this is easy.”

Asman agreed on the latter point, but said it’s unfair “to say there’s a concrete proposal when you’re still working out details to try to deal with the needs of farmers who need a lot of these undocumented workers and at the same time not providing an amnesty.”

The anchor was putting it nicely by saying the administration is “still working out details.” The administration is apparently so bereft of solutions that, a day earlier, Rollins bizarrely suggested that nonworking able-bodied Medicaid recipients (a cohort whose size she severely overstated) will replace deported farmworkers, toiling in fields to meet Medicaid work requirements that will be implemented under Trump’s budget.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden is trying to take credit for helping out hospitals he actively moved to defund, according to HuffPost.

Van Orden, who cheered for the stripping of benefits brought by Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, has been trying desperately to tie himself to a new budget that would increase his state’s Medicaid provider tax rate before it could be frozen at its current level by the president’s legislation. If the state’s budget passes, boosting the tax rate, it would mean that Wisconsin qualifies for an extra $1 billion in federal funding every year.

In multiple posts on X, Van Orden has repeatedly targeted Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, trying to take credit for the budget measures to ensure health care access. Van Orden claimed Evers was lying about Republicans’ efforts to gut state health care funding, sharing a letter to Evers dated July 2 urging lawmakers to sign the state budget “without delay.”

Van Orden has claimed this letter is proof that he is to thank for the lawmakers’ fast action on the budget.

But Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Evers, said that Van Orden was lying.

“Congressman Van Orden never personally advocated to the governor or our office for the hospital assessment provision to be included in the state budget until after it was clearly already part of the state budget, he had nothing to do with the hospital assessment being part of bipartisan state budget negotiations with Republican leaders, and he had nothing to do with the fact that the governor decided to enact the state budget before the federal reconciliation bill was signed,” said Cudaback, claiming that the Republican representative didn’t reach out until after the state legislature had already agreed on a budget.

“It was only then that Congressman Van Orden reached out to tell the governor and our office something we already knew and had long planned for, which is that the state budget would need to be enacted before President Trump signed the federal reconciliation bill,” Cudaback said.

“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare,” she added.

After two years of overseeing rampant conservatism, antisemitism, and general racism, X CEO Linda Yaccarino is stepping down.

“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,” Yaccarino wrote on the platform Wednesday.

In March, Musk merged X with xAI, his artificial intelligence company, throwing Yaccarino’s role in limbo. And aside from the years of Musk-adjacent drama that this move could be tied to, Yaccarino’s exit does come just one day after Musk’s Grok made a string of alarmingly antisemitic posts, and just two days after it responded in first person when defending Musk from questions into his relationship with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

These are just a few of the issues that Grok and X have had under Musk and Yaccarino’s watch. Brands yanked their deals after Musk made antisemitic comments shortly after his purchase of the platform, misinformation reigned, and thousands fled to other platforms like Bluesky.

“This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI,” Yaccarino wrote. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world. As always, I’ll see you on X.”